Re: off topic

[Oliver Kiddle <okiddle@yahoo.co.uk>]

Ray Andrews wrote:
> Ignore this as appropriate gentlemen, but for anyone who feels like 
> answering, what is the culture vis. oh-my-zsh?  I get a vague feeling 
> that the members of this list view is as something strange and alien or 
> even heretical.  It seems to be something 'else' -- oh-my-zsh users 

It hasn't really been discussed so I can only give my own perspective.

They've done a great job of promoting zsh and making some of the nicer
features available to people who don't want to work out how to configure
them. Those are perhaps areas where we've been weak.

If someone posts here with a problem, it can make it a lot harder to
determine the cause. It means they have a complex setup which they don't
understand themself and some combination of plugins could be interacting
in odd ways. So to some extent it is something 'else' but that something
else is still a layer on top of zsh so not removed from us.

> never come here and we never go there.  As for me, when I was first 
> getting involved I tried it and, notwithstanding that I had no idea what 
> I was doing, I found it to be a candy store sort of thing and preferred 
> the honest brutality of trying to get plain vanilla zsh working.  Thoughts?

Run zsh -f without reading any documentation (just some bash/tcsh
experience) and there's little apart from perhaps alwayslastprompt that
will stand out as different and clearly better than bash. oh-my-zsh just
adding compinit, vcs_info, syntax highlighting and the small collection
of styles for descriptions and grouping in completion listings makes a
big difference to people's impressions.

If I look beyond that and the zillions of prompt themes, it surprises me
how little there is there that looks interesting. Many of the plugins
are just aliases which are no good to you if you don't actually learn
them. Or if you don't use the software they cover - e.g. they seem to
have a lot of stuff for ruby on rails developers.

There's clear advantages to having a powerful setup that you understand
well. If that process now involves "brutality" then you can understand
why people might be be happy to just take what they get with oh-my-zsh:
and I don't view that as heresy.

Oliver